Although wonder is a response to what is extraordinary or regarded as such, this covers a variety of things. Hence, wonder covers a spectrum from mere surprise or puzzlement to stronger responses like dread or amazement; moreover, it is often linked to other powerful responses like fear or admiration, and it can lead people into many pursuits and areas of reflection. I look at the variety of the objects of wonder, and of the neighbouring responses and conceptual connections found here, (...) then I discuss the response of wonder itself, and its causes and effects. Finally, I ask why the sense of wonder can atrophy, and whether it can be suppressed deliberately. (shrink)

As well as disagreeing about how much one should donate to charity, moral theories also disagree about where one should donate. In light of this disagreement, how should the morally uncertain philanthropist allocate her donations? In many cases, one intuitively attractive option is for the philanthropist to split her donations across all of the charities that are recommended by moral views in which she has positive credence, with each charity’s share being proportional to her credence in the moral theories that (...) recommend that particular charity. Despite the fact that something like this approach is already being used by real-world philanthropists to distribute billions of dollars of donations, it is not supported by any of the approaches to moral uncertainty that have been proposed thus-far in the philosophical literature. In this paper, we will develop a bargaining-based approach to moral uncertainty that honors the proportionality intuition in favor of splitting one’s donations. We also show how this bargaining-based approach has several further advantages over the best alternative proposals. (shrink)

Relativism is the view that the truth of a sentence is relative both to a context of utterance and to a context of assessment. That the truth of a sentence is relative to a context of utterance is uncontroversial in contemporary semantics. This chapter focuses on three points: whether the version of contextualism is vulnerable to the disagreement and retraction arguments, and if so, whether these problems can be avoided by a more sophisticated contextualist theory. The points include: whether relativism (...) really does avoid the four problems posed for the other theories; and whether there are other theories that also avoid the problems, without running into the problems facing relativism or problems of their own. The chapter concentrates on two families of views that have been called relativist: Relativism about propositional truth; and Relativism about utterance truth. (shrink)

Various philosophers have wanted to move from a (P.F.) “Strawsonian” understanding of the “practices of moral responsibility” to a non-skeptical result. I focus on a strategy moving from a “response-dependent” theory of responsibility. I aim to show that a key analogy associated with this strategy fails to support a compatibilist result. It seems clear that nothing could show that nothing we have been laughing at has really been funny. If “the funny” is similar to “the blameworthy”, then perhaps it would (...) follow that nothing could show that no one we have ever blamed has really been blameworthy. The comparison is interesting, but inconclusive: even if we grant that these properties are normatively similar, the latter has substantive empirical presuppositions, whereas the former does not. One important upshot: even if the standards operative in our practices cannot be mistaken, it could nevertheless be that no one has ever met these standards Ruling out this possibility seemingly requires re-engaging in all of the so-called "metaphysical" debates Strawsonians are keen to avoid. (shrink)

Moral latitude is only ever a matter of coincidence on the most popular decision procedure in the literature on moral uncertainty. In all possible choice situations other than those in which two or more options happen to be tied for maximal expected choiceworthiness, Maximize Expected Choiceworthiness implies that only one possible option is uniquely appropriate. A better theory of appropriateness would be more sensitive to the decision maker’s credence in theories that endorse agent-centred prerogatives. In this paper, we will develop (...) and defend a modified version of this view that allows for agent-centred prerogatives and supererogation as part of its verdicts about appropriateness. (shrink)

These are my materials (a short precis, and replies to John MacFarlane, Mitchell Green, Ryan Wasserman, and Anthony Bigg and Kristie Miller) for a symposium on my book, _The Open Future: Why Future Contingents are All False_ (OUP, 2021) in *Analytic Philosophy*. [The contribution from MacFarlane is available on his website, those from Wasserman and Green are on their Academia profiles, and the contribution from Bigg and Miller is on Miller's PhilPapers profile.].

What is it to see the world, other people, and imagined situations as making personal moral demands of us? What is it to experience stories as speaking to us personally and directly? Kierkegaard's Mirrors explores Kierkegaard's answers to these questions, with a new phenomenological interpretation of Kierkegaardian 'interest'.

"If our procedure is to work steadily in the direction of drawing as fine art, rather than beginning from examples of such art, where shall we begin? One attractive possibility is to begin at the beginning—not the beginning in prehistory, which is already wonderful art, but with our personal beginnings as children. From there it will be the ambitious project of this book to investigate 'the course of drawing,' from the first marks children make to the greatest graphic arts of (...) different cultures."—from the Introduction Patrick Maynard surveys the rich and varied practices of drawing, from the earliest markings on cave walls to the complex technical schematics that make the modern world possible, from cartoons and the first efforts of preschoolers to the works of skilled draftspeople and the greatest artists, East and West. Despite, or perhaps because of, its ubiquity, drawing as such has provoked remarkably little philosophical reflection. Nonphilosophical writing on the topic tends to be divided between specialties such as art history and mechanics. In this engagingly written and well-illustrated book, Maynard reveals the interconnections and developments that unite this fundamental autonomous human activity in all its diversity. Informed by close discussion of work in art history, art criticism, cognitive and developmental psychology, and aesthetics, Drawing Distinctions presents a theoretically sophisticated yet approachable argument that will improve comprehension and appreciation of drawing in its many forms, uses, and meanings. (shrink)

What constitutes a scientific discovery? What role do discoveries play in science, its dynamics and social practices? Must every discovery be attributed to an individual discoverer (or a small number of discoverers)? The paper explores these questions by first critically examining extant philosophical explications of scientific discovery—the models of scientific discovery, propounded by Kuhn, McArthur, Hudson, and Schindler. As a simple, natural and powerful alternative, we proffer the “change-driver model”: in a nutshell, it takes discoveries to be cognitive scientific results (...) that have epistemically advanced science. The model overcomes the shortcomings of its precursors, whilst preserving their insights. We demonstrate its intensional and extensional superiority, especially with respect to the link between scientific discoveries and the dynamics of science, as well as the award system of science. Both as an illustration, and as an application to a recent scientific and political controversy, we apply the considered models of discovery to one of the most momentous discoveries of science: the expansion of the universe. We oppose the 2018 proposal of the International Astronomers’ Union as too simplistic vis-`a-vis the historical complexity of the episode. The change- driver model yields a more nuanced and circumspect verdict: (i) The redshift-distance relation shouldn’t be named the “Hubble-Lemaître Law”, but “Slipher-Lundmark-Hubble-Humason Law”; (ii) Its interpretation in terms of an expanding universe, however, Lemaître ought to be given credit for; but (iii) The establishment of the expansion of the universe, as an evidentially sufficiently warranted result, is a communal achievement, emerging in the 1950s or 1960s. (shrink)

Organisationen spielen in modernen Gesellschaften eine zentrale Rolle. Der Beitrag geht davon aus, dass in den mittlerweile etablierten Formen von Ethik und Ethikberatung in Einrichtungen des Gesundheitssystems eine angemessene Reflexion des Organisationsbezugs oft ausbleibt bzw. eine besondere Herausforderung darstellt. Wir konzipieren deshalb eine „prozedurale Organisationsethik“, die sich kritisch mit der organisationalen Passung der Prozesse ethischer Reflexion auseinandersetzt. Daraus lassen sich als Anregung für Theorie und Praxis von ethischen Prozessen praktische Schlussfolgerungen ableiten. Sie betreffen die Orte der Differenzsetzung für die Frage (...) nach dem Guten; die ethischen Hintergrundtheorien und die Frage nach der organisatorischen Verknüpfung der Reflexionssettings. (shrink)

Definition of the problem Organisations play a vital role in modern societies. This article presumes a lack of sufficient organisational reflection of well-established forms of ethics and ethics counselling in institutions belonging to the health sector or sees particular challenges where it is implemented. Arguments We have therefore conceived a procedural type of organisational ethics which critically examines the organisational fit of processes in terms of ethical reflection, leading to practicable suggestions. Conclusions On the one hand they relate to where (...) differences are established when asking for the good; on the other hand they are concerned with background theories and the organisational fit of the reflection settings. (shrink)

The Polymath Project is an online collaborative enterprise that was initiated in 2009, when Timothy Gowers asked whether and how groups could work together to solve mathematical problems that “do not naturally split up into a vast number of subtasks.” Gowers proposed to answer this question himself by actually trying to set up such a collaboration, based on interactions taking place in the comment-threads of a series of posts on a WordPress blog. Hence, the first project officially started in early (...) 2009, to be proclaimed successful only 6 weeks later (Gowers and Nielsen 2009). From its inception until April 2018, 15 more Polymath problems (and a handful of smaller or related ones) have been launched. These projects have attracted attention from different scholarly communities, including the philosophy of mathematical practices, from the perspective of which the Polymath Project can be seen as a vast repository of mathematics in action. This chapter continues previous work by its authors on the topic in question and topics related. More specifically, for the purposes of this volume, it is our aim to both summarize and expand upon these earlier contributions. The starting point is the above observation that in the past decade, the issue of “massively collaborative mathematics” (to be qualified below) has drawn quite some attention. However, does it also warrant intensive philosophical attention in particular? For, as exciting as these developments might be from mathematical and other points of view, the enhanced possibilities that have come with it do not per se give rise to any philosophical import. In Van Bendegem (2011), one of us has indeed tentatively argued for the philosophical relevance of these new dynamics of proof construction flowing from the wide availability and efficiency of Internet technology. We shall below briefly rehearse and update the argument given there. (shrink)

I argue that some perceptual experiences are vague. To do so, I identify a characteristic feature of vagueness and show that some perceptual experiences have this feature. These include blurry experiences, experiences of color under low lighting, and experiences of number, as in the case of the speckled hen. The conclusion that these experiences are vague has two noteworthy consequences. First, it presses us to see whether and how existing theories of vagueness can be extended to perceptual experience. Second, it (...) sheds light on several puzzles in the philosophy of perception. (shrink)

Collaboration between the arts and health sectors is gaining momentum. Artists are contributing significantly to public health efforts such as vaccine confidence campaigns. Artists and the arts are well positioned to contribute to the social conditions needed to build trust in the health sector. Health professionals, organizations, and institutions should recognize not only the power that can be derived from the insights, artefacts, and expertise of artists and the arts to create the conditions that make trust possible. The health sector (...) must also recognize that, while it can gain much from partnership with artists, artists risk much—namely, the public's trust—when they are in such partnerships. This essay unpacks these claims and considers the care and ethical considerations that must be brought to these partnerships to yield constructive pathways for ethical collaboration as well as for both establishing public trust and continuing to hold the health care profession accountable for becoming more trustworthy. (shrink)

The fundamental problem considered is that of the existence of a joint probability distribution for momentum and position at a given instant. The philosophical interest of this problem is that for the potential energy functions (or Hamiltonians) corresponding to many simple experimental situations, the joint "distribution" derived by the methods of Wigner and Moyal is not a genuine probability distribution at all. The implications of these results for the interpretation of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle are analyzed. The final section consists (...) of some observations concerning the axiomatic foundations of quantum mechanics. (shrink)

Griinbaum's own article sets forth his views on the ontology of the curvature of empty space, especially in the geometrodynamics of Clifford and Wheeler. ...

This article aims to test the hypothesis that metaphysical grounding is an instance of essentially ordered (or per se ) causation, a species of causation identified by medieval philosophers and theologians like Aquinas and Scotus, but largely forgotten from then on. The article reviews some of the consensus of grounding theorists on the nature of metaphysical grounding (or ontological dependence) compared to some of the crucial characteristics of essentially ordered causal series as articulated by scholastic and neo-Aristotelian philosophers then and (...) now. The authors emphasize their similarities, which they hold is enough to render strongly plausible the thesis that grounding is essentially ordered causation (G = EOC). Moreover, they highlight the potential benefits of this identification both for theories of grounding and EOC, especially as it concerns matters of fundamentality. Finally, they consider the limits of their hypothesis. (shrink)

This short paper provides an explanation of Hume's problem of induction.

Animalism is the doctrine that you and I are animals. Like any substantive philosophical position, animalism faces objections. For example, imagine a case of conjoined twins, where there are two heads, but only one “body,” and where each head seems to have its own typically human and fully discrete mental life. It would be natural to assume that each of the twins is a thing like you and me—each twin is one of us. But it appears that each twin cannot (...) be a distinct human animal, since it appears in this case that there is only one animal. So it appears that animalism renders the wrong verdict in this case. I present two responses to this worry, drawing on Aristotelian claims about the centrality of sensation to animals, and on an account of organism-hood from Maureen and Samuel Condic. I close by considering craniopagus parasiticus and cephalopagus, and show the Aristotelian response is effective in such cases as well. (shrink)

Three main lines of arguments are presented as a defense of randomization in experimental design. The first concerns the computational advantages of randomizing when a well-defined underlying theoretical model is not available, as is often the case in much experimentation in the medical and social sciences. The high desirability, even for the most dedicated Bayesians, of physical randomization in some special cases is stressed. The second line of argument concerns communication of methodology and results, especially in terms of concerns about (...) bias. The third line of argument concerns the use of randomization to guarantee causal inferences, whether the inference consists of the identification of a prima facie or a genuine cause. In addition, the relation of randomization to measures of complexity and the possibility of accepting only random procedures that produce complex results are discussed. (shrink)

Global warming presents challenges to utilitarianism. Its structural features seem to suggest that individuals have no moral obligations to take steps to reduce their carbon footprints. For those who find this to be an unacceptable result, Jamieson proposes an alternative. He argues that utilitarians should embrace a version of virtue ethics. They should embrace what he calls ‘green virtues’. In this article, I argue that Jamieson's proposal does not adequately address the ethical challenges that global warming poses for utilitarianism. I (...) propose an alternative. Rather than aiming to inculcate green virtues, we should be aiming to inculcate a certain social identity: a green identity. Not only is this approach more in keeping with utilitarianism, but recent research in the social sciences also suggests that it is much more likely to result in an impactful reduction in global emissions. (shrink)

The heavily discussed (neo-)Lucretian symmetry argument holds that as we are indifferent to nonexistence before birth, we should also be indifferent to nonexistence after death. An important response to this argument insists that prenatal nonexistence differs from posthumous nonexistence because we could not have been born earlier and been the same ‘thick’ psychological self. As a consequence, we can’t properly ask whether it would be better for us to have had radically different lives either. Against this, it’s been claimed we (...) can form preferences as to which ‘thick’ (psychological) self our ‘thin’ (metaphysical) self would be better off ‘associated’ with. I argue that these discussions draw the right distinction, but do so in the wrong place: understanding the ‘thin’ self phenomenally instead of metaphysically allows us to understand how we can rationally form preferences to have been somebody else. (shrink)

How we envision God’s forgiveness shapes our thinking about human forgiveness as well. Whereas some contemporary Christians such as Miroslav Volf struggle to square victims’ demands with a God who forgives and keeps no record of wrongs, many early Christians expected God to fastidiously punish or reward every deed. In contrast to both extremes, I revisit recent philosophical work on purgatory, which emphasizes sanctification over satisfaction. This approach reveals how God’s forgiveness is consonant with restorative justice. By considering an alternate (...) vision of God’s justice, we can thereby reimagine how our forgiveness too is compatible with—and in fact necessitates—the work of moral repair. (shrink)

Presentists deny that past or future things exist. Some presentists also deny that there are any underlying truths about the past or future. While this seems to conflict with our everyday tensed discourse, presentists might avoid conflict by adopting a theory of hermeneutic fictionalism about the non-present. Under such a theory, everyday utterances of non-present-tensed sentences are taken to engage with a fiction, rather than expressing truths about the past or future. In this paper I defend a specific version of (...) this view: meta-fictionalism about the non-present. Under this view there is a socially-understood non-present fiction, a 'story of history', derived from apparent records existing in the present. Meta-fictionalists take our everyday tensed discourse to involve assertions about the content of that fiction. I argue that this view is plausible, and that it fares better than pretence fictionalism, a competing view that has already seen discussion in the literature. (shrink)

In this paper, missing attribute values in incomplete data sets have three possible interpretations: lost values, attribute-concept values and ‘do not care’ conditions. For rule induction, we use characteristic sets and generalized maximal consistent blocks. Therefore, we apply six different approaches for data mining. As follows from our previous experiments, where we used an error rate evaluated by ten-fold cross validation as the main criterion of quality, no approach is universally the best. Thus, we decided to compare our six approaches (...) using complexity of rule sets induced from incomplete data sets. We show that the smallest rule sets are induced from incomplete data sets with attribute-concept values, while the most complicated rule sets are induced from data sets with lost values. The choice between interpretations of missing attribute values is more important than the choice between characteristic sets and generalized maximal consistent blocks. (shrink)

Literature and Moral Feeling argued that ethics is best understood as a constraint on egocentric self-interest. That constraint is specified variously by groups or individuals who set parameters differently within common ethical principles, and who use a range of emotion-guided narrative genres to imagine and evaluate possible actions. Though it covers many ethical concerns (collectively termed “morality”), this account leaves out fairness (alternatively, justice). The following essay seeks to make up for that deficit. Framing its analysis by reference to a (...) well-known problem in Milton's Paradise Lost, it distinguishes two systems of ethical response organized around first- and third-person perspectives. Like the first-person concerns of morality, third person concerns of justice are specified by setting parameters within common principles. In treating these principles and parameters, the essay articulates cognitive and affective components of third-person ethical evaluation. These, then, help to resolve the problem with Milton's poem. That resolution, in turn, suggests further complications in the account of ethical evaluation. (shrink)

Visual forms of episodic memory and anticipatory imagination involve images that, by virtue of their perspectival organization, imply a notional subject of experience. But they contain no inbuilt reference to the actual subject, the person actually doing the remembering or imagining. This poses the problem of what (if anything) connects these two perspectival subjects and what differentiates cases of genuine memory and anticipation from mere imagined seeing. I consider two approaches to this problem. The first, exemplified by Wollheim and Velleman, (...) claims that genuinely reflexive memories and anticipations are phenomenally unselfconscious, with the co-identity of the notional and actual subjects secured by a determinate causal history. The second approach posits some distinctive phenomenal property that attaches to genuinely reflexive memories and anticipations and serves to experientially conflate the notional and actual subject. I consider a version of the second approach, derived from Kierkegaard’s discussions of phenomenal contemporaneity, and argue that this approach can better account for the possibility of affective alienation from the selves we were and will be: the way in which our sense of self and awareness of our causal history can sometimes come apart. (shrink)